May The Force Be with You

With each passing day, the grim tally mounted. In Brooklyn an 11-year-old girl was wounded in her family's home by a stray bullet from the street outside. Two days later an 18-year-old Bronx man was stabbed to death by a panhandler who had demanded a dollar. Then a Queens man was shot and seriously wounded as he chased gunmen who had robbed a neighborhood grocery store. A typical week in New York City.

But public outrage about the city's record crime spree seemed to crystallize last week, and officials scrambled to respond with calls for more police. New York's Governor Mario Cuomo urged the city to hire 5,000 more officers immediately, returning the force close to the peak strength of 32,000 that it wielded in the early 1970s. "The time for exquisite analysis has passed," said Cuomo. "You have to produce the police."

The Governor's announcement was a direct challenge to Mayor David Dinkins, who was already dodging complaints that his quiet, cautious manner -- deemed an asset during last fall's election campaign -- was not well suited to leading the fight against crime. With budgetary constraints frustrating his efforts to fulfill a campaign promise to expand the force, the mayor consistently refused to commit himself to a specific number before receiving a manpower report from police commissioner Lee Brown on Oct. 1. Cuomo's address, and a growing sense of crisis, forced Dinkins at last to announce that an additional 3,000 to 6,000 police would be hired. "If the broader message has not been clear before," he declared, "I state it simply now. Thousands of officers are on their way."

The next question was how to pay for them. Though the Governor promised to help the city find ways to come up with the estimated $340 million it will cost to add 5,000 recruits, he offered no money up front. That confronted ) Dinkins with the prospect of proposing more taxes and service cuts just two months after winning the city council's approval for a record $800 million in new local taxes. As one step, he promised to consider a proposal by city council speaker Peter Vallone for a 25 cents surcharge on lottery tickets.

The mayor also took issue with last week's TIME cover story on the city's woes. He complained that the TIME/CNN poll accompanying the piece had focused on questions in which New Yorkers bewailed the city's decline but had left out the fact that 70% of residents said they still think it is the greatest city in the world. "There was no selective release," responded Hal Quinley, senior vice president of Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, which conducted the survey. "The poll results were overwhelmingly negative."